Key facts:
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The Sbercoin would be tied to the ruble and geared towards corporate clients.
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If the project is finalized, it would come into operation by 2021.
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A week after Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the Law on Digital Financial Assets (DFA), the country’s largest state bank is already preparing its stablecoin. The Sberbank is getting ready for the issuance of Sbercoin that would be oriented to the corporate clients of the institution.
The new crypto asset would be tied to the local fiat currency, the ruble, and could be issued at some point in the next year, according to bank representatives quoted by local media. One of them was Sergei Popov who stressed that the new legislation opens the doors for the design and launch of a stablecoin for the liquidation of financial assets.
“We can probably issue, on the basis of the law that was adopted, a token that we can tie to the ruble, a token so appropriate that it can be the basis or a tool for the agreements of some other digital financial assets,” said Popov. He serves as director of the transactional business division at Sberbank.
Local media they pointed out that the largest Russian state bank continually explores developments within the financial sector and that stablecoins are one of them. According to Antonina Levashenko, director of the Russian Center for Competition and Standards Analysis, the Sberbank is starting to build its own ecosystem and is looking beyond traditional financial services.
For the official, the fact that the largest state bank shows interest in issuing a private stablecoin shows the desire to “speed up transactions and reduce costs.” Some elements that could consolidate the project are the infrastructure that the bank has and the liquidity it manages.
Central banks, stablecoins and adoption
The adoption that the bank would assume is in tune with the worldwide flow of central banks or state financial institutions that are evaluating or developing stablecoins. For the first case, central bank digital currencies (CDBC) are topics that remain on the agenda for at least 17 governments around the world. Some bet on establishing systems with distributed registries in blockchains, while others would not include them.
On the technical side, the Sberbank project It would framed in Hyperledger’s Fabric, a corporate-cut blockchain project promoted by the Linux Foundation, and would use its network of nodes hosted in the cloud. In addition, the system would be open for any company to join.
It should be mentioned that, although Russia legalized bitcoin with the DFA, prohibited its use as a payment method for the acquisition of goods or services. The law views cryptocurrencies as a electronic data set that can be adaptable to investments.
The Sberbank has a long history of approaching cryptocurrencies and the so-called distributed ledger technology (DLT). CriptoNoticias reported in December 2017 that the bank had executed his first transaction with blockchain in the Russian banking industry.
The institution also reported in January 2018 that it proposed to trade cryptocurrencies in Switzerland, due to the restrictions of the Russian government. At that time the plan was to use the subsidiary Sberbank Switzerland AG to carry out the operations.
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